1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to interpersonal communications and more specifically to unified communications based on context and spanning multiple communication modalities.
2. Introduction
Unified communication is an evolving communications technology architecture which automates and unifies all forms of human and device communications in context, and with a common experience. Its purpose is to optimize business processes and enhance human communications by reducing latency, managing flows, and eliminating device and media dependencies. One challenge facing unified communication system is how to identify implicit relationships, such as invoking, triggering, containing, and continuing relationship, among different communication sessions, such as call, IM, email, voicemail, and short voice and video messages. Identifying these relationships can help users better manage their conversations that have different modalities and on different devices.
Further this implicit relationship identification should be based on latent content or contextual content of the emails. That is when a new mail is initiated or received, if the topic of the email, based on its content or context, is known then the system can identify the relationship and place the email in a similar conversation thread.
One approach in the art, a project named Loom, allows users manually group conversations into threads. Another commercial practice is to track explicit “replying” or “forwarding” relationship among email messages, such as in Outlook and other email clients. Another slightly more advanced approach is track the subject and participants of email messages, such as Gmail.
In Google Wave, a discontinued commercial project that continues in an open source efforts under the “Wave in a Box” project, a wave is similar to a communication thread which holds all related conversations in one container. Google Wave requires users to explicitly drop messages in a wave. These and other presently available solutions rely on explicit user behavior (replying or forwarding) to group messages into threads without any detailed analysis to find an implicit relationship among messages or other automatic grouping of messages into one thread.
Traditional unified communication applications focus on integrating different communication channels, such as voice, video, instant messaging, email, voicemail, and presence, into one inbox. This is a foundation for more complicated unified communication functions. However, as more communication channels are integrated and the number of messages rapidly grows in people's inboxes, people require a more intelligent and efficient way to organize their inboxes.
Recently, Google's email service, Gmail, released a new feature called Priority Inbox. Gmail's Priority Inbox tries to identify users' important emails so users can handle important messages first. This feature is still in its beta stage but shows a useful concept of helping users to organize or at the very least prioritize their inbox.
Another example of providing intelligence in users' inboxes is an application called Xobni. Xobni can create rich profiles for every person with whom a user has ever communicated. The profiles include communication statistics, social connections, and communication histories. For an email, Xobni can automatically show people profiles related to that email. Gmail Priority Inbox and Xobni are two complementary applications. One reduces information to avoid distractions, while the other enriches information to improve productivity. However, unified communications still have many shortcomings which become more and more evident as the size, type, and quantity of online communications increase.